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Submit your 2015 proposals today!

We are pleased to announce that our call for talk proposals is now open! The deadline for submitting your proposal is 11:59 PM PT (UTC-8:00) on March 7, 2015*. Read on for complete details.

Our Goal

Open Source Bridge’s purpose is to gather a diverse citizenry and inspire one another to make the world a better place through open source technology and open culture principles.

This makes Open Source Bridge stand out from other community-driven technology conferences. Instead of focusing on a single language, platform, or area of knowledge, we work to unite people across the spectrum of open technology and culture.

We are looking for people from all backgrounds and areas of experience to submit talk proposals. Your starting point could be web development, project management, open hardware engineering, security, quality assurance, data visualization, or user experience.

If you work or play in open source, we want to hear from you. Let us know how you are building your communities, small or large. All speaking experience levels are welcome.

Some talks from past years that we really liked and felt captured the spirit of our event include:

Conference Tracks

We’ve split the tracks into the following five areas in order to create a conference that promotes cross-pollination and provide space for detailed discussion:

Business: How do you contribute to open technology and culture projects while still putting food on the table and paying the bills? How do you run a business on open principles?

Cooking: How did you get something to work? Show us how to write the script, configure the utility, debug the code. Share your best recipes.

Chemistry: We know that a recipe works, but why? Show us the science behind the recipe. Explain the components of a project and how they interact.

Culture: Give us your people recipes! What makes open technology and culture communities effective? Demonstrate how you motivate people to work together well.

Hacks: We want to know how you pulled it off. Show us your most ingenious hacks, kludges, work-arounds, and duct-tape jobs. It doesn’t have to be clever or elegant, it just has to work!

Don’t fret too much about selecting the perfect track. If you’re not sure, drop us a note. If we think you’ve mis-categorized something, we’ll ask you about it.

Public Proposals & Feedback Wanted

All proposals are public (except for fields marked private to organizers) and we encourage everyone to read through the submitted ones, leave comments and star as favorites talks you would like to see at the conference. Your feedback is extremely useful to our content selection committee. If you’ve submitted a talk, publicize it and ask others to leave feedback.

Also, all proposals also have a unique identifier (like a course number) you can use to tag your blog posts or other online content with discussion and related materials. Later we’ll use this ID to connect the conference sessions with content from around the web.

Encourage Others to Submit

Not prepared to give a talk at Open Source Bridge, but have someone in mind you’d like to see speak? Send them a note and let them know.

Speaker Benefits

If you are selected to speak at Open Source Bridge, we will waive your attendance fee. We regret that we are not able to cover the cost of travel or lodging for speakers at this time (although we are discussing creating a limited travel scholarship fund and will post to the blog if we do that). By not covering travel costs for our speakers, we are able to keep ticket prices low and make the conference accessible to the largest number of participants possible. However, if your proposal is accepted but you are unable to come due to travel costs, please let us know and we will do what we can to help out.

Speaking at Open Source Bridge is a fantastic way to participate in the conference. Start working on your proposal today and then submit it here.

Additionally, all those who submit a proposal but are not selected to speak will be able to register at the early bird registration price.

Acceptance Notifications

Proposal acceptances and wait-list notifications will be sent by the end of April.